Abbot looked to the medics, noting the one female medic, whom Carton recognized as Olivia Aguilar, whom he’d met at an accident scene. “Thank God it’s you.”
“What do we have here?” Olivia asked.
“Woman in her thirties, got blown off a pier and hit the ground. Think she’s hurt her ankle,” Abbot said. “Got a kid, a girl about seven, I’d say. They’re both soaked to the bone.”
Carton almost mentioned that it looked like she was flying, but decided against it.
Olivia knelt beside the woman. “Ma’am, can you hear me? Is this your little girl?”
The woman turned her thousand-yard toward Olivia, her gaze refocusing. “She’s my kin.”
“You said she went flying?” Olivia asked, looking to Abbot and Carton.
“Wind must have caught her and blew her across the water,” Abbot said.
“She’s soaked to the skin, and she isn’t shivering,” Olivia noted.
“Hypothermia?” her partner, a rookie kid clearly on his first call, asked, taking a collar brace from their gear and reaching to put it on their patient.
“Looks like it.”
The woman pulled away. “Please, no hospitals. If I end up there, he’ll find me.” But she made no further movement as they slid a back board under her and strapped her on before lifting her onto the gurney. She loosened her arms as they started lifting the little girl from her chest. The child awakened, eyelids flicking in the lights from the police cars, and then opened her mouth in a scream.
Olivia put a gentle hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Hey, hey, it’s all right, you and your mom are gonna be all right.”
“No! No! Don’t take her away! Aunty Sibyl, don’t take her away!” The child cried.
“It’s all right, these people are here to help you and your aunt,” Carton said, soothingly. “Are you running from someone?” The woman did not reply.
“Miss, you’ll be safer at the hospital than out here. If nothing else, you and your girl can warm up and get clean. We won’t let anyone know where we’re taking you, and if anyone tries to bother you at the hospital, they’ll keep them away. But you and your little girl don’t look so good,” Olivia said, giving her the listen to a mom who’s helping you look. To Abbot, she added, “This sounds like a domestic case.”
“It does,” Abbot agreed.
“All right…” the woman said. Olivia nodded to her colleague, and they carried the stretcher to the ambulance, Abbot carrying the little girl behind them, Carton trailing the group.
An hour later, Carton lingered in the waiting room of North Shore Medical Center, pacing the floor slowly, waiting for word of either patient.
Mercedes, the head night nurse, approached him. “I figured you’d still be here. Waiting for news on the mystery woman and her little girl?”
“I was hoping for the rest of the story, but I don’t think it’s going to press,” he said.
The lights flickered. The handful of other people in the waiting room, a few costumed college kids waiting for news on a friend injured in a haunted house trick gone wrong, gasped.
“Nothing to worry about: the lights have been doing that all night, from the storm. They go down, we’ve got a good strong generator to back us up,” Mercedes said. To Carton, she added, “Between the hypothermia and her sprained ankle, she hasn’t been the chattiest. Neither is the little girl. I could barely get their names out of them, so we’ve had to admit them as Jane and Jenny Doe.”
“Maybe I can help,” Carton offered.
“We’ve got them on dialysis to warm up their blood, so perhaps you can chat with the woman once she’s more like herself.”
“Worth a shot.” Mercedes led him to a room in the back of the ICU, where the mystery woman lay in bed, clad now in a hospital gown, white with blue specks, blankets covering her. A cannula snaked from under the covers to a dialysis machine cranking away by the bedside. She lay watching the pump whirling, till she sensed his presence and turned to look to him.
“You’re looking better,” he said, coming to the foot of the bed.
“I’m warmer,” she said. “What do you want?”
“Call it a professional bad habit: I’m a news photographer, and I’m full of questions. Just looking for some answers.”
“Like ‘What are you?’”
“More like ‘How did you do that?’ and ‘Who were you running from?’”
She looked him in the eye, narrowing her own. “What makes you think I was running from something?”
“Because why else would you go flying in a storm like this? A friend of mine at the National Weather Service station in Boston is calling this ‘the perfect storm’, given all the factors that came together at the right time to create it.”
She gathered herself under the covers, wary now, her face gone stony. “How did you know I was flying?”
“Cameras don’t lie, and I know what a person caught in a gust of wind looks like. They fall all over the place, going end over end and flailing. You looked like you were riding the wind without a broom. Or one of the long poles the accusers in the Witch Trials claimed the victims rode on to get to their Sabbats in the woods.”
Some of the wariness flowed out of her face. “You’re good. You’re getting too close for comfort.”
“Close to what?”
“Close to what I am.”
“You have…powers.”
“We call ourselves gifted or talented. You have enough words for us. Witches, for example, not that the word means what it used to, these days.”
“Not a word you care to use.”
“It’s too obvious. It used to be, if people knew, they’d burn us or hang us if we didn’t escape them. These days, if they find we have true talents, they put us away in hospitals ‘for our own good’.”
“That explains why you didn’t want them taking you here.”
“That’s part of it.”
“And the other part has to be something mundane. An abusive ex?”
“Close. Give me your hand.”
“My hand?”
“You’re better off just doing it.” She raised the hand free of an IV taped into it, turning her palm up. He put his hand, palm down, into it. She gripped it, hard, firm, warmth building between their palms. The lights in the room flickered and the whirr of the dialysis machine skipped a beat before resuming its background hum. The world tilted, keeled forward.
He blinked, and he gazed down at the image of a woman’s form, black hair and olive skin, like the little girl, lying in a pool of blood spreading on a concrete floor. A K-Bar style knife, blade covered in blood, lay beside her.
A rangy man with stringy red hair lurched into view. “Look what you made me do!”
“I made you do? I just got here,” the mystery woman’s voice replied. “What did you do to her?”
“She attacked me, I had to defend myself. She’s one of you after all,” the man sneered.
“We’re not invincible, you know.”
“Course not, like the ones they burned in Salem.”
“Hanged.”
“What?”
“They hanged people in Salem, most of them. No one was burned in Salem. You’re thinking of continental Europe, Germany in particular.”
“Should’ve burned ‘em all. There’d be none of you left.”
“We’re not having this conversation. I’ve had it too many times before.”
The view shifted, grew dusky as if the color had drained from it. The man looked around, frowning, confused. “You can’t run off on me, bitch!” The view shifted again, as if she’d stepped out of his way. Everything blurred. A shield? Carton wondered, having heard of such things.
No, a veil, the woman’s voice said, from outside the image.
You’re reading my thoughts? Carton asked, silently.
You’re reading my thoughts, she replied.
In the memory, she trailed the man up a staircase, keeping to the side and walking in sync with his step
s to cover hers. They emerged into the first floor of a suburban home: frayed but functional furniture, toys and children’s books on the living room couch, a scattering of silk and real autumn leaves in vases on the dining room table, along with colored gourds, a ceramic haunted house, and a small soft sculpture ghost, the kitchen lightly cluttered with the usual kitchen items, along with more than the usual amount of herbs, some growing in pots. A witch’s kitchen? He wondered.
“Seffy? Where are you?” the man called, reaching to a ball of kitchen twine on the counter, unspooling a length, and cutting it off with a knife taken from a wall rack.
“Reggie?” a little girl’s voice called from the rear of the house.
Not her father then…Carton thought.
Custodial, sort of. Her mother, Luna, my half-sister, had terrible taste in boyfriends, his guide replied.
The man turned toward the girl’s voice, testing the strength of the twine. “You need help with your Halloween costume?” he called back. The woman, in the memory, careful to keep behind the man, took up a skillet from the sink. The man, Reggie apparently, headed back through the house, following the voice, testing the strength of the twine. The woman stepped closer to him as he got halfway down the hallway leading to the bedrooms and conked him on the back of the head with the skillet. He stopped in his tracks, stunned, then fell face forward like a collapsing telephone pole and lay still. She dropped the skillet beside him, letting out a whuff that ended in a whimper. She hesitated, pulling in a long, steadying breath. The view cleared as if she’d dropped the veil.
“Persephone? You all right?” her voice called out, looking toward a door that stood ajar, a wreath of gingham autumn leaves with a sweet-faced soft sculpture witch in a purple gown, holding a chubby black kitten.
The door opened wider and the little girl whom the mystery woman had been carrying in her flight came out into the hallway, clad in a pink and white gown like something out of a 19th century German faery tale, like a faery queen or a kindly witch.
“Aunty Sybil! You gonna help me with my costume?” Seffy—Persephone, it seemed—said, holding up her arms and twirling. She looked around, puzzled. “Did Reggie go away?”
“I made him leave: he was mad and shouldn’t have been here.”
“Are we still trick-or-treating?”
“We might, we’re going north to the Catskills to see my family. We can trick-or-treat there,” the woman, Sybil, said, stepping into the room, a fanciful little girl’s room with plush unicorns and witch and wizard dolls on the shelves, among small rows of books between bookends, and a bed covered in pink and white.
Fetching a warm sweater and sweatpants from a chest of drawers, she helped Seffy out of the gown and put the clothes on before pulling the dress back on. “Are we gonna ride the wind?”
“Sure, it’s quicker,” Sybil said, leading Seffy out of the room, carefully avoiding a blurred shape on the floor, out to a coat closet in an enclosed porch, pulling a pink coat onto Seffy and a cloak onto herself. She led Seffy into the yard, the wind sending fallen leaves scrambling across the yard toward them. “Let’s run…” Sybil said. They rushed toward a stand of oaks at the edge of the yard, their half-bare branches thrashing in the wind. The wind caught them up, raising them above the ground, above the trees, till they rode the wind, which pulled them into a wild undertow turned upside down, dragging them over towns and land to the sea spreading out like a churning green-blue sheet, gray clouds swirling about them…
Carton rose from her mind as she withdrew her hand from his, dropping her hand to her chest. He staggered back, coughing.
“God…I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be. We lived.”
“No, no—ugh! No, I’m sorry I’m—ack—coughing.”
“It’s a lot to take in, and this was your first time. I knew the wind would be strong, and I’d heard about the storm. But I didn’t think it would be that strong, that the storm would extend that far, much less that it would pull us out to sea and all the way here,” she said.
He steadied himself on the foot of the bed. “You’re from south of here. Pennsylvania?”
“You got it, not exactly the friendliest country for the talented, but my sister and Persephone and I managed. Why, though? You planning to put this together for your big scoop?”
“Not anymore.”
“Good. You know that I’m Sybil, but who are you?”
“Carton, Carton Tillinghast.”
She smirked. “Bet the kids had fun with that.”
“People still do.”
“So are you going to rat me out to the authorities?”
“By my account, you went for a walk and got caught in an updraft.”
“An updraft that carried me from Harrisburg, across the Atlantic, to Massachusetts?” she asked, dryly.
“Far as I’m concerned, everything you did was in self-defense and to protect your niece. On the record, I’d say you took her away from a horrible domestic situation to get some space and to enjoy Haunted Happenings.”
“All right, and where am I staying?”
“I know someone who could take you in. Her name’s Irina, she owns a magic stuff store, and she’s been a mother hen toward some of the college kids at Salem College. I’m sure she’s got a corner for you and…Persephone?”
Sybil smirked a bit. “I know, cliché modern witch name, right? Our mother was a crunchy-granola type, and Luna took after her.”
“No different than a Catholic girl getting named Philomena or Bernadette.”
At that moment, two doctors in lab coats, one shorter than the other entered. “Are you authorized to be here?” the shorter of the pair asked, narrowing his dark eyes behind his glasses.
“I’m the guy who helped bring her in,” Carton replied.
The shorter doctor took a step closer as if to remove Carton from the premises, though his colleague reached out as if to hold him back. “I’m afraid you’ll have to step out into the hallway.”
“I was on my way out anyway, to make a phone call,” Carton replied, complying and going for a payphone in the hospital lobby.
The line, when he dialed out, crackled and fizzled from the storm, then picked up. “You’ve reached the answering machine of Madame Irina Stamos. I’m probably in the midst of casting a spell for some needful soul, but if you leave a message after the tone, I shall make contact with you—”
The line clicked, and Irina’s voice replied. “Hello?” she asked, less Garbo-esque than in her answering machine message.
“Hey there, it’s Carton. I’m at Northshore Medical and there’s a woman and her niece who need a roof over their heads.”
“Not one of your girlfriends, I take it?”
“No, she’s…talented,” he said, and quietly told Irina the soundbite version of what he had seen on the wharf.
Irina listened in silence, then spoke at length, “I’ll be over as soon as I can,” and hung up before he could say more.
Ten minutes later, Irina sailed into the entryway, her red and black embroidered skirt and her rain cloak trailing a step behind her.
“May I see her?” she asked Carton.
“She’s resting in the ICU, and the staff might not be the most thrilled to have you around.”
Irina gave him a narrow eyed smirk of mystery. “I have my ways of managing situations like that,” she said, and approached the nurses’ station. Carton trailed her to the room, but remained outside the door, keeping watch and trying not to eavesdrop. An unnecessary gesture, as he found out: he could hear them talk, but not make out the words.
Irina emerged some minutes later, her face grave, but with less of the worry she showed earlier. “I’m glad you called me, Tillinghast: she’s the cousin of someone I trained. I was aware that she had trouble at home, but I didn’t think, or perhaps I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.”
“She’s safe here in Salem, though?”
“Safe as houses, as they say. This area’s become a haven f
or the gifted. But there’s something you need to do.”
“Get rid of the film I shot on the wharf? Consider it done.” Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Abbot and a female Salem cop talking, but not paying much heed to him and Irina. Nor could he make out their words. He darted a wide-eyed look to Irina. “You’re gifted, too.”
She smirked at him. “That’s a sound veil. My brother calls it The Cone of Silence. It doesn’t cancel sound out completely, as you’ve probably noticed, but it does make eavesdroppers less successful.”
“Comes in handy, especially in tense situations,” he said. “I think I knew…”
Irina tilted her head. “That I’m talented?”
“That you were different. That magic is a true thing for you,” he said.
He hitched a ride back to downtown Salem with Abbot, returning to his apartment and the dark room he’d rigged in a closet. The usable shots of the surf and the streets and the masquerade at the Hawthorne Hotel he set aside to bring to his editor at the Salem News. The other negatives, the shots of Sybil in flight, he inserted into an empty 35 mm film container and capped it, tucking it into his shirt pocket.
He delivered the photos, Halsey carping at the images of flying trash on an empty Essex Street, but impressed with the images of the costumed crowd at the Masquerade—some dressed like elegant Anne Rice vampires, some dressed like Venetian Carnival-goers, some dressed as random odd characters, and few looking like they’d tossed something together from the bottom of their closets—and the shots of the surf on Derby Wharf. “Get more like these: it’s getting on toward day, you’ll have better light.” That granted Carton the perfect chance to carry out his assignment.
The sky had paled to a charcoal gray as Carton approached the wharf, the rain diminished but the wind still blew fierce, whistling in the telephone lines and the rigging of the ships. The daytime police detail tried to wave him back, till he showed them his press pass.
He shot a couple rolls of film, catching the image of the murky daybreak, the waves crashing on the wharf, less wildly than before, yet no less dramatic in their power, the harbor light silhouetted against the murky sky, a promise that storms could batter the place but some things could withstand the fury of nature.
One Night in Salem Page 10